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Tamsin Shaw, Nietzsche's Political Skepticism

Reviewed by Saul Tobias

An
increasingly large portion of recent publications in Nietzsche studies
concerns Nietzsche's political thought. The main fault line in this
scholarship runs between those who believe that Nietzsche provides a
normative account of politics, including an account of the proper ends
of government and of the institutional means for the attainment of these
ends; and those who believe that no such positive account of politics
can be found in Nietzsche's thought. On this basic question, Shaw sides
with the skeptics, but not because, as others have argued, Nietzsche's
intellectual commitments lie with metaphysics, or cultural and aesthetic
philosophy, rather than with politics. On the contrary, Shaw insists
that Nietzsche's interest in politics is longstanding and substantive.
She offers a brief but illuminating account of Nietzsche's close
identification with the political views of Burkhardt and the Basel
School, which opposed Ranke's nationalist historicism and the Bismarkian
pursuit of the Kultuurstaat ideal. Such views, which remain
influential on Nietzsche's thought, are neither a- nor anti- political
but represent a thoughtful defense of the appropriate ends of culture
and scholarship and the dangers of a political appropriation of
intellectual and cultural independence by the state.

Hence, Shaw does not dispute the seriousness of Nietzsche's interest in
politics but rather shows that Nietzsche saw no way to square political
realities with his philosophical and moral commitments. The core of her
argument concerns the problem of normative political authority, and this
is where her distinctive contribution to discussions of Nietzsche's
political thought lie. Shaw argues that with the decline of religious
belief, which effectively connected normative values to social and
political institutions and justified certain political arrangements,
politics and philosophy diverge onto different paths. Following
secularization, the modern state, which cannot rule by force alone, must
pursue legitimacy through appealing to values endorsed by the general
populace. Ideally, these values would be consistent with philosophical
and scientific truth, and in upholding these values, the state would
appeal to its citizens' powers of reason, but this is rarely the case.
For the most part, normative legitimacy and hence political authority
are produced through forms of ideological persuasion that depend on
appeals to emotion, tradition, and cultural and political prejudices.
This is where politics fails for Nietzsche. Endorsing recent views
concerning Nietzsche's moral realism, Shaw argues that Nietzsche upholds
the belief that reasoned thought, when freed from the blinders of
religious or cultural prejudice, can distinguish between true and false
moral judgments. The problem is that such truth is difficult to obtain,
available at best to those few who have the requisite philosophical
experience, and, above all, is difficult to convey to a general populace
lacking the requisite personal qualities or training. Hence Nietzsche's
political skepticism: given his commitment to the philosophical pursuit
of moral truth, no political dispensation, given its need for popular
consensus, is likely to advocate unpopular or philosophically demanding
views, such as those that Nietzsche might advocate, as the basis of its
claim to normative authority.

Because Shaw's argument centers on the problem of political norms, most
of the book is occupied with an analysis of Nietzsche's views on
morality and the question of his moral realism or antirealism. As a
result, the book engages only cursorily with the extensive secondary
literature on Nietzsche's politics, and has little to say about the
substantive arguments made in those works concerning the picture of
political life and political institutions that may be constructed from
Nietzsche's thought. The argument that Shaw makes and the evidence on
which she draws can hence be countered by arguments highlighting
different passages from Nietzsche's work that suggest his commitment to a
higher unification of culture and politics, exemplified in a
distinctive notion of Grosse Politik, or of a radical
transformation of politics by leaders of exceptional power and charisma.
These are certainly problematic notions in Nietzsche's thought, and
their precise meaning for politics as conceived in the traditional
western philosophical tradition remains unclear, but they nonetheless
offer grounds for questioning the consistency of Nietzsche's skepticism
regarding the inherent incompatibility of politics and higher moral or
cultural commitments. Furthermore, Shaw views politics through the lens
of classical political theory, which is concerned above all else with
the origin and justification of political authority. Hence she overlooks
the value of Nietzsche's thought for politics conceived as forms of
individual and communal action that may affect relations of powers, the
distribution of resources, or the institutions of the state, but which
may not necessarily include a final account of the normative grounds of
state authority.

Shaw's intention is to pose a narrowly delineated problem concerning the
implications of Nietzsche's moral realism for the question of normative
political authority. The result is a carefully written book that
contributes a valuable strand to the increasingly variegated cloth of
Nietzschean political thought. Yet the broader questions, provoked but
not seriously addressed by Shaw's book, are these: if the moral values
that Nietzsche may endorse are incompatible with politics conceived as
the practical problem of the legitimation of state authority, does this
mean that Nietzsche has no positive contribution to make to political
thought? Or rather, does it mean that the meaning and scope of the
"political" must itself be widened beyond that of classical political
theory? If the latter is true, then the catalogue of scholarly work on
Nietzsche and politics is likely to grow for some time yet.